Cell phone manufacturers will have to look out or Apple and Google will eat their lunch. Lots of consolidation seems likely here as well; how many hopefuls are trapped in their decaying last-gen software and product lines? They will be unable to level up, if you will. At a guess, this means most everybody except maybe Nokia. Things will look reasonable as long as the old cell phone market still grows. Then not.

It will be interesting to see how the consumer-facing oligopolistic operators evolve in this setting (they too seem ultimately superfluous). Apart from operators accepting their fates as bit pipes, when will we see the ‘real’ internet (not the telco-accomodating one) make inroads into the last holdout: wireless infrastructure?

In short: the internet part of the pie will grow, the telecoms one will shrink. Telecoms is a legacy market, an end game, so milk the cash cows and invest in something with a future.

You think Ericsson is on a better track than NSN? It seems to me that NSN is right-on with their move towards high margin services rather than commoditized hardware — basically they are emulating IBM. My experience with Ericsson (limited to the US market) is that they have always succeeded on the strength of their sales force and its ability to insinuate itself within the higher echelons of a carrier.

BTW, I thought Huawei is considering buying Motorola’s Infra Business ..that would give them some leeway

Perhaps the managerial rot went too deep, but it would have warmed my heart to see someone really try to rebuild it as a smaller more focussed entity.

While Huawei and ZTE have been super aggressive in pricing and listening to their customers, quality issues remain. As I understand it, their gear is not what Ericsson’s, NSN’s or even ALU’s are.

Ericsson is the only one of the big vendors to have vision of what infra providers will be in the future. You’ll notice I used the word provider here, because the business model is changing. NSN’s future hinges on shifting its business east and capturing a meaningful share in the US. ALU’s future hinges on I don’t know what…becoming much better at executing. Huawei and ZTE need to build on their success in pricing (often severly undercutting their western counterparts) and improve quality and service.

That being said, they all do not have a future. And the changes taking place will hasten the decline of some.

The growth for the vendors will not be where it has been. The vendors all need to position solutions for extending the network into low margin markets with poor supporting infrastructure (power supplies, roads, security).

Just some random thoughts with little cohesiveness…

I do agree the big changes are coming and next couple of years are going to be even tougher for telecom than most people realize. I think part of it is lack of imagination/innovation. I am hoping to hear something ground shifting to emerge from these “giants” R&D operations.